500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
Just got back from a panel discussion tonight about the power of pro bono design and architecture, and I can tell you that the pro bono movement of designing for good is gathering power. Around this time last year, Emily Pilloton of Project H Design appeared on the Colbert Report to discuss the idea of designing something that wasn’t just good, but would have a good effect on the world. Colbert gave her hell, as he does most good people, and his treatment made her ideas seem a little bit on the fringe.
Ah, but that was then. This is now. John Peterson, Founder and Chair of Public Architecture, moderated the panel I attended. John makes a compelling argument for a simple idea.
Public Architecture asks architecture and design firms nationwide to pledge a minimum of 1% of their time to pro bono service.
Simple, right? But powerful. There is certainly dollar value there- some $25 million worth of donated services from Public Architecture’s 1% program alone. But there is also human value. John made the point tonight that architectural firms and their clients need to raise expectations about the value we all get back from pro bono work. Not all of it can be deposited in a bank.
As John said in a recent interview he did for our film SHELTER, “The movement that we’re seeing around design for the public good is really coming about because the design profession has a desire, sort of a pent up desire, to serve.”
This desire gives rise to projects that are not only imaginative, but necessary, too, like the Food Chain project by Robin Elmslie Osler and her architecture firm. The Food Chain project, which aims to play a role in eradicating hunger, is a series of ingenious vertical farming walls used for growing produce in urban areas. Other pro bono design stories are told in The Power of Pro Bono, a book about pro bono work from the perspective of both the architects and the clients. It’s published by Metropolis Books.
As architect Eric Corey Freed put it in an interview with me for SHELTER, “For centuries architecture was relegated to special buildings – cathedrals, office buildings, skyscrapers. Many people assume that that was architecture, everything else is building. And what we seen is that we can create designs for the masses, designs that inspire, delight and bring joy to uplift people and uplift the soul. All the power of architecture could be made to reach everybody.”
When you combine that uplifting power with the power of pro bono, you reveal a powerful force for positive change in the world. Design is unavoidable – it’s everywhere and in everything. Why not design for good?
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
Just my opinion, but Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are both dilettantes driven by ego and fueled by too much money. They think they can get elected by saying just what our Governator said in order to get elected. They are dilettantes because, like Sarah Palin, they want to do the job because it will make them look cool to their friends. When the going gets tough they will run away, like Sarah Palin, and become dilettante journalists on Fox. But, wait – there’s hope! There are also some visionaries around here.
A visionary is someone who looks at the same things we all see and sees something different. For example, Elon Musk made money when he co-created PayPal, but he’s a visionary for creating an electric-car company called Tesla, and he’s proven himself a visionary again by partnering with Toyota to bring a $30,000 electric car to market. Seth Godin is a visionary for re-imagining marketing as a form of education, and Jacqueline Novogratz is also a visionary for using capitalism to bring dignity to the poor. All of these visionaries have something in common. What is it?
“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I mean to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.” — John Stuart Mill
This is not a time to be thinking conservatively. It’s a time for visionary thinking that cuts across boundaries. Some may contend, “Yeah, like Palin and Fiornia!” and I say to them I only get 500 words here so stop interrupting and go write your own article. Fact is, I haven’t seen much bold thinking in politics that wasn’t also stupid. (See quote above.)
I’m going to veer away from Carly and Meg and concentrate on some visionaries I’ve met recently and examine how the engine of their success is all about cutting across boundaries. At Public Architecture in San Francisco Richard Neill and I ran a workshop this week called “How to Tell a Story Online.” 
It was for changemakers and activists, and we showed them how to transform a social issue, or the story of a neighborhood, or a cause, and make it into a short video piece intended to play online and inspire people. I think this is a new frontier, a re-inventing of video media that blurs the boundary between advocate, journalist, urban planner and storyteller. It requires visionaries – and there are more than a few of them at Public Architecture.
On the same day as that workshop, I spoke on a panel at the American Society of Media Photographers. Photographers like to control what’s in focus, but many of the photographers I met that night were experiencing a disorienting blurriness. Their editors are asking them to blend video and stills, and this makes for an identity crisis. To be a journalist, an illustrator, a shutterbug and a cinematographer are all becoming the same thing. I’m told that beer and Dramamine consumed together can help with this unstable feeling, but luckily photographers are by nature iconoclasts, and they need to reinvent themselves anyway all the time, so they don’t need Dramamine, they need to let the boundaries fall where they may.
Let’s welcome more visionaries who are ready to remix, recombine and renew. I’d rather focus on them than on dilettantes who pretend to be prepared, but really are right where they are not supposed to be.
Don’t get me started on people who wear sandals to fly on an airplane.
Binocular photo: M0Rt3s via Flickr and Creative Commons License. All other photos by Lee Schneider.
